Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  “The intelligence collection effort more or less came to a standstill”: William W. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth and Courage (Fowlerville, MI: Wilderness Adventure Books, 1991), p. 240.

  “transparently jerry-built”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 72.

  Colonel Quinn had been the chief intelligence officer for the Seventh Army in North Africa, France, and Germany, working in direct liaison with OSS. He faced fierce opposition to the new intelligence service in Washington. He brought a package of inside information on the Soviet Baltic Fleet to an admiral at the Office of Naval Intelligence. “Your organization is infiltrated with communists,” replied the admiral. “I couldn’t possibly accept anything that you might want to give me.” There were several such rejections. So Quinn decided he needed a clean bill of health from the only man in Washington who could grant it: J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He went to Hoover, stated his case, and watched as Hoover smiled and fairly licked his lips as he considered the problem. “You know, this is quite a relief,” Hoover said. “Colonel, I fought that Bill Donovan tooth-and-nail, particularly regarding operations in South and Central America.” The FBI had been ordered out of every nation south of the Rio Grande after the war; Hoover’s G-men burned their intelligence files rather than turn them over to Central Intelligence, the beginning of a never-ending battle. Now, for the moment, Quinn’s coming to the FBI hat in hand took some of the heat out of Hoover’s hatred. “I admired Donovan, but I was certainly not fond of him,” Hoover continued. “So here we are at the end of that road. What do you want me to do?”

  “Mr. Hoover,” Quinn replied, “the simple answer to your question is to find out if I have any commies in my organization.”

  “Well, we can do that,” said Hoover. “We can run a national check.”

  “While you’re doing it subversively, would you please check them criminally as well?”

  “All right.”

  “Before we decide on how to do it, for posterity, and for ultimate cooperation, I would like to ask that you send me a representative to be your liaison with my organization.”

  At this, Hoover almost fell out of his seat. “I knew what was going on in his mind,” Quinn recalled. “He was probably thinking, my God, this guy is asking for a direct penetration in his agency.” Quinn had just invited the FBI to spy on his spies. He needed the anticommunist inoculation from Hoover for the outfit to survive at the beginning of the great red scare that gripped Washington for nearly a decade. His decision temporarily increased the standing and reputation of Central Intelligence at home.

  Colonel Quinn was placed in charge of the Office of Special Operations, in charge of espionage and covert action overseas, by Director of Central Intelligence Vandenberg in July 1946. He found his new assignment “contrary to any principles of organization, command and control that I had ever experienced.” In search of cash, he went to Capitol Hill and sought $15 million for espionage from a few members of Congress. “I just knew that these people didn’t know what we did,” he said. So Quinn asked for a secret executive session, and he told the members a stirring tale about a cleaning woman in Berlin who had been recruited as

  a spy, photographing Soviet documents at night. The congressmen were rapt. Quinn got his money, under the table, and it helped to keep American intelligence alive.

  He also tried to re-enlist OSS veterans like Bill Casey, who would take over as director of central intelligence thirty-five years later. But in 1946, Casey wanted to make money on Wall Street more than he wanted to continue serving his country. He and his OSS friends feared that intelligence would remain a cross-eyed stepchild of the military services, run by generals and admirals in thrall to transient tactics rather than skilled civilians focused on the big strategic picture. The future of American intelligence was threatened, Casey wrote to Donovan, by “today’s moral and political climate, which I attribute to a considerable degree to our late Commander in Chief,” President Roosevelt. Casey’s list of recommendations to Quinn included Hans Tofte, who later tried to run covert operations against China during the Korean War, and Mike Burke, who tried to run operations across the iron curtain in the early 1950s. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers, pp. 234–267. J. Russell Forgan letter to Quinn, May 8, 1946; Casey letter to Forgan, January 25, 1966; Casey letter to Donovan, August 20, 1946; all three letters in J. Russell Forgan papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

  “I don’t suppose there had ever been or could ever be sadder or more tormented period of my life”: Sherman Kent, Reminiscences of a Varied Life, n.d., privately printed, pp. 225–231. Kent wrote in 1946: “From the very beginning, there was administrative trouble of a high order, much of it avoidable; personnel actions—new appointments, replacements, and overdue promotions—moved with the ponderous slowness of the glacier or not at all. Life outside the government [became] more and more attractive to irreplaceable professionals. They began to leave in the order of their importance to the organization; and as replacements did not appear, morale declined.” “Prospects for the National Intelligence Service,” Yale Review, Vol. 36, No. 1, Autumn 1946, p. 116. William Colby, the future director of central intelligence, wrote that the separation of the scholars of the research and analysis division from the spies of the clandestine service created two cultures within the intelligence profession, separate, unequal, and contemptuous of each other. That critique remained true throughout the CIA’s first sixty years.

  Smith warned the president: The warning, declassified by the White House in 2004, was titled “Intelligence and Security Activities of the Government” and dated September 20, 1945, the day the president ordered the OSS abolished.

  “royally bitched up”: Harold D. Smith papers, “Diaries—Conferences with the President,” 1945, FDRL.

  “a disgraceful way”: Leahy cited in Smith memo, “White House Conference on Intelligence Activities,” January 9, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp.

  “At lunch today in the White House”: Diary of William D. Leahy, January 24, 1946, Library of Congress; Warner, “Salvage and Liquidation,” CIA/CSI.

  Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest: Russell Jack Smith, later the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, remembered that when the Central Intelligence Group was first established in January 1946, “Truman began asking daily, ‘Where’s my newspaper?’ It seemed almost that the only CIG activity President Truman deemed important was the daily summary.” His predecessor, Sherman Kent, wrote in 1949 that the CIA should strive to resemble “great metropolitan newspapers,” with “small forces of decorous and highly intelligent salesmen” to “push the product”—the product being, as it turned out, the president’s newspaper. The newspaper became known as the President’s Daily Brief. Delivered by courier to the president for nearly six decades, it was the CIA’s one constant source of power. But the last thing a spy engaged in the business of espionage wants (or needs) is the daily demands of newspaper deadlines. Spying does not produce a steady flow of news to meet a daily deadline. It is a slow search to find ground truths, to know the mind of the enemy by silently stealing secrets of state. There was, and remains, “a conflict between the real demands of espionage and the reportorial needs of current intelligence,” wrote William R. Johnson, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service. Was the job of American intelligence to beg or borrow or purvey information and sell it, repackaged, to the president? Or was it to steal state secrets abroad? This conflict was not resolved in favor of espionage. Johnson concluded, and he spoke for much of the clandestine service after three decades of toil, that the business of current intelligence lay outside the CIA. And for good measure, he wrote: “As for the political action people, the media planters and the grey radio broadcasters, and the corrupters of venal politicians, let them make their accommodation wherever it suits. Their work is not clandestine…. Let the Security Council find a place for them
somewhere removed from the conduct of espionage.” William R. Johnson, “Clandestinity and Current Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1976, CIA/CSI, reprinted in H. Bradford Westerfield (ed.), Inside CIA’s Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency’s Internal Journal 1955–1992 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 118-184.

  “There is an urgent need”: Souers, “Development of Intelligence on USSR,” April 29, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 345-347.

  “We had accustomed ourselves”: Kennan interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1996, National Security Archive transcript, available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/-espisode-1/kennan1.html.

  “the best possible tutor”: Walter Bedell Smith, My Three Years in Moscow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950), p. 86.

  On a cold, starry night in April 1946: Ibid., pp. 46-54

  “an apprentice juggler”: Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 67.

  “throwing money at a problem”: Ibid., pp. 92–95. Berlin base chief Dana Durand confessed that the intelligence he and his men had produced was shot through with “rumors, high level gossip, political chitchat.” Durand to Helms, “Report on Berlin Operations Base,” April 8, 1948, declassified 1999, CIA. In one of many such intelligence swindles, Karl-Heinz Kramer, “the Stockholm Abwehr,” sold the Americans highly detailed reports on the Russian airframe industry, which he claimed came from his extensive network of agents inside the Soviet Union. In reality, his source was a set of aircraft manuals bought from a Stockholm bookstore. James V. Milano and Patrick Brogan, Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line: America’s Undeclared War against the Soviets (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1995), pp. 149–150. In another scam, Central Intelligence bought a chunk of “radioactive uranium” advertised as having been swiped from a shipment in East Germany bound for Moscow. The hot potato was a hunk of lead wrapped in aluminum foil. This kind of fiasco led General Leslie Groves, the man who ran the Manhattan Project, the secret program that created the atomic bomb, to set up his own intelligence unit, dedicated to determining every possible source of uranium in the world and tracking the development of atomic weapons in the Soviet Union. General Groves, judging Helms’s men “unable to function satisfactorily” and thus incapable of keeping an eye on Stalin’s plans to build a Soviet atomic bomb, kept the existence of this unit and its mission secret from Vandenberg and his men at Central Intelligence. That contributed to the failure of the CIA to accurately predict when America’s monopoly on weapons of mass destruction might end. “Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the National Intelligence Authority,” August 21, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 395–400; Groves memo to the Atomic Energy Commission, November 21, 1946,FRUS Intelligence, pp. 458–460.

  an “operating agency”: Elsey memorandum for the record, July 17, 1946, CIA/CSI.

  “intelligence agents all over the world”: “Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the National Intelligence Authority,” July 17, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 526–533. For the context of the war scare of 1946, see Eduard Mark, “The War Scare of 1946 and Its Consequences,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 1997.

  “conspiracy, intrigue, nastiness”: Hostler interview with author. Hostler spent the closing months of the war on an interim assignment in Italy, working at a 1,200-room royal palace outside Naples, helping James J. Angleton of the OSS in “strengthening his control over the various Italian intelligence and security networks.” For the background of the Romanian fiasco, see Charles W. Hostler, Soldier to Ambassador: From the D-Day Normandy Landing to the Persian Gulf War, A Memoir Odyssey (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1993), pp. 51–85; and Elizabeth W. Hazard, Cold War Crucible (Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 1996). Hazard is the daughter of Frank Wisner.

  Chapter Three

  “extraordinarily important events”: Wisner quoted in C. David Heymann, The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club (New York: Atria, 2003), pp. 36–37.

  the ideas of this obscure diplomat: Kennan would in time disavow his intellectual constructs for the Truman Doctrine and the CIA. The Truman Doctrine, Kennan wrote two decades later, built “the framework of a universal policy” out of a unique problem: “All another country had to do, in order to qualify for American aid, was to demonstrate the existence of a Communist threat. Since almost no country was without a Communist minority, this assumption carried very far.” But the doctrine was read by almost all Americans in 1947 as a ringing proclamation for the forces of freedom. The American intelligence officer James McCargar was working in Budapest on the day of Truman’s speech. For months on end, spirits at the American Legation there had been “going down and down, because we saw that the Russians were getting away with what they wanted to do, which was to take over Hungary entirely.” The story was the same across the Balkans and perhaps—who knew?—all of Europe: “There was no question whatsoever that this was going to be a contest, a real confrontation” between the United States and the Soviet Union. “We became more and more depressed”—until the day the Truman Doctrine was proclaimed. “We all went out into the streets that morning with our heads held high,” McCargar said. “We were going to back up democratic forces as much as we could anywhere around the world.” George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–50 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 322; McCargar oral history, FAOH; McCargar interview with author; Vandenberg memo, “Subject: Special Consultant to the Director of Central Intelligence,” June 27, 1946, CIA/CSI.

  The origins of the Truman Doctrine trace back to the war scare of 1946. Late in the afternoon on Friday, July 12, 1946, as the first covert operation and the first war plans against the Soviets began to take shape, Harry Truman had a bourbon or two in the White House with his counsel, Clark Clifford. He asked him to pull together something on the mystery of the Soviets, something his Central Intelligence news service seemed unable to do to his satisfaction. Clifford, already a little addled by his proximity to power, decided to take on the job himself. No one as close to Truman was less qualified. “I had no real background” in foreign policy or national security, Clifford said. “I had to learn as I went; it was catch as catch can.” Truman was not the first president to set up his own amateur intelligence shop at the White House. He would not be the last. Clifford’s work, written with Truman’s aide George Elsey, was delivered in early September 1946. It borrowed and built on Kennan’s words, and then took a long leap into the unknown. Clifford oral history, HSTL. “The Joint Intelligence Committee,” CIA/CSI, 2000.

  The United States had to assume that the Soviets could attack anywhere at any time, and so the president had to be ready to wage “atomic and biological warfare” against the Soviet Union, for “the language of military power is the only language” the Soviets understood, it said. The only true alternative would be a worldwide effort by the United States to “support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.” To do that, the nation had to build a new and unified set of foreign policies, military plans, economic aid programs, and intelligence operations to blunt the Soviets. The United States had to lead the rest of Western civilization “in an attempt to build up a world of our own.”

  Director of Central Intelligence Vandenberg caught wind of Clifford’s endeavor. Not to be outdone, a week after Truman commissioned Clifford’s report Vandenberg told Ludwell Lee Montague, his chief reports officer, to deliver a blockbuster on the military and foreign policies of the Soviet Union, and to have it on his desk by Tuesday. Montague, without any competent staff, did it all by himself. Sleeping very little over the next hundred hours, he delivered on deadline the first analysis of the Soviets ever published by Central Intelligence. Montague concluded that while Moscow anticipated a clash with the capitalist world and would strive to solidify control of all the lands behind the iron curtain, it would not provoke the next war and could not afford a direct conflict with the United States in the foreseeable future. It was as good a guess as any. This report was the first Soviet estimate, the fir
st of hundreds, one of the most difficult and least satisfying jobs the CIA undertook. Like those that followed, it was based on few hard facts, proof of the wisdom put forth by Sherman Kent that “estimating is what you do when you do not know.” The report sank like a stone. It painted shades of gray when what was wanted at the White House was black-and-white. And it suffered one fundamental weakness: the army, the navy, and the State Department still would not share their thinking, much less their secrets, with the upstarts at Central Intelligence. Sherman Kent, “Estimates and Influence,” Foreign Service Journal, April 1969. See also Ludwell L. Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), pp. 120–123 [hereinafter CIA/LLM]. This is a CIA history, declassified in part. Ludwell Lee Montague, “Production of a ‘World Situation Estimate,’” CIA, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 804–806.

  This was a crippling blow. Over the next four years, Montague later wrote, Central Intelligence consistently failed to deliver what Truman wanted: knowledge from all known sources. The one insurmountable obstacle was the military. They wanted to do their own thinking and predicting and threat analysis, as they still do. Montague’s work was the last big think piece on the Soviet Union that Central Intelligence would submit to the president for nearly two years. The bitter lesson would deepen with time: the CIA would wield power in Washington only when it had gathered its own unique secrets.

  Clifford, by contrast, had the clout that Central Intelligence lacked. He had the finest office in the West Wing of the White House and he met with the president a half-dozen times a day. He had the president’s ear. He demanded and received the secrets of the State, War, and Navy Departments in the president’s name. The report he and Elsey delivered in September lifted liberally from the work of the Joint Chiefs’ own intelligence staff. Yet it, too, had a fatal flaw: no one in the U.S. government had any way of accurately reading Moscow’s military capabilities and intentions. The best information on the Soviets available to the U.S. government back then, Richard Helms reflected fifty years later, was sitting in the stacks of the Library of Congress. But Clifford, working off the cuff, had done precisely what Central Intelligence was supposed to do. He gathered the government’s thoughts. Clifford-Elsey memo, draft copy, September 1946, CIA/DDRS. See also James Chace, Acheson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 157; and Clark M. Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President (New York: Anchor, 1992) pp. 109–129.